WTF Happened to Silicon Valley?

Toxic Tearoom

"Greed is good," said Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame, with hair slicked back and hardened- as if his pomade was hand-wrung from the ink of his petroleum stocks. Talking on impossibly large cell phones (by today's standards), drinking, drugs, and the ever-present insider trading, "Wall Street" encapsulated the extremes of 1980s capitalistic worship- and all of its downfalls.
Today's Gordon Gekkos look relaxed in front of CNBC cameras, a sportcoat at most, waxing poetic verse about the grand changes their companies' tech would produce, eagerly identifying themselves as the first/the innovator/the unicorns, gleefully accepting the coffers of capital and credit presented by investors at their feet. These Gekkos are not stock brokers. These Gekkos relish in singularity but swam in circles like schools of fish around sharks. These Gekkos bathed in the California sun versus the steel and glass reflection of the New York skyline, but the greed was ever-present.
And no, it was not good.
Welcome to Silicon Valley, 2022-2023. Fueled by equal parts genius, arrogance, callousness, and of course, the pandemic, Silicon Valley reemerged as the birthplace of billionaires with dazzling solutions and valuations. However, for many startups, the solutions touted to investors were as much designed to attract investors as they were to solve a problem- perhaps a solution in search of a problem. A change in consumer habits post-COVID and these companies fell hard and fast- like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce fell in love. It seemed appropriate to have Tay and Trav show up in the show notes, because they are everywhere. Unlike Trav and Tay Tay, however, there is nothing to love about these greedy companies.

Your hosts will discuss the spectacular start-up failures in Silicon Valley, the billions upon billions of dollars wasted, the dizzying rise of these companies, and the devastation left behind when those companies crashed. The common thread of these stories- greed- and the volume of waste these companies left behind will have you feeling some kind of way, as it were.
2023 Was An Extinction Level Year For Tech Startups- Mercury News
Tech Company Layoffs the COVID Tech Bubble Bursts- Information Week
How Big Tech's Predatory Culture Fueled Failures Like Silicon Valley Bank- LA Times
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